If you had told me a year ago that Donald Trump was going to skate away from all the legal trouble he was in, I would have laughed in your face. I was confident after all his years of ripping people off and not paying taxes and taking the Fifth (nearly 450 times in one day in 2022, remember that one?), the law was finally going to catch him. You could get away with that stuff as a rich and powerful (if bankrupt) real-estate mogul; but once you run for office, I thought (and wrote), you’ve entered a new arena, where accountability is more real, and fancy lawyering can’t brush away obvious facts.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Okay, he didn’t totally skate. He was convicted in the Stormy Daniels case. He was scheduled to be sentenced—be prepared to wince hard here—Tuesday. As in yesterday. Imagine that reality for a few seconds.

But we live in a different reality, thanks to Trump’s election victory. And that reality isn’t only about the past. It’s very much about the future, because the lesson Trump is going to take away from these legal experiences is that he can do anything he wants.

Before we get to that, let’s review the cases, criminal and civil.

On the criminal side: Yes, he was convicted in the Daniels hush-money case. Judge Juan Merchan, in delaying sentencing last week, gave Trump’s lawyers until next Monday to file a motion seeking to dismiss the case. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg will fight such a move, but it would hardly be shocking to see Trump’s lawyers win this one. The voters elected the guy president.

Second, as we learned this week, DOJ special counsel........

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